Portal:2019 Alumni Newsletter

Welcome to the Alumni Newsletter (Reborn!) Enjoy!

Coaches' Corner. Men's Team (Denny Merideth). First, a hearty thanks from the team to Sarah and Harry for making this inaugural newsletter an avenue for keeping in touch with the alumni. Second, a resounding thanks to all alumni for the support of the rugby programs at USAFA. We have a high hopes and an enthusiastic team for the spring season. Over the last two days I have met individually with over 40 players as well as the club leadership team. They are all like a bunch of thoroughbreds at the gate ready to launch into the season. Their enthusiasm is truly amazing and will make for an exciting spring. The team will focus on 7s building upon the strides and success of the 2018 7s season with great showings in both the Las Vegas 7s and at the 7s College Rugby Championships (CRC) in Philadelphia. Only 1 of 15 players who competed at the 2018 CRCs graduated. We have several who will challenge those players for positions on the starting 7s team. Our intent for the spring is threefold. First to focus the top players on 7s with primary tournaments being: Las Vegas 7s on 28 Feb – 2 Mar, Kansas City Heart of America on Mar 29-30, Regional D1A Qualifier Tournament at USAFA on Apr 27, All Academy 7s Tournament at USNA on May 4, D1A National 7s Tournament on May 18 and the CRCs in Philadelphia on Jun 1. The next level of players will also focus on 7s with tournaments on other weekends in locations like Albuquerque, Bozeman, and CSU building their skills in solid competitions. The third area of work will be 3 to 4 matches of 15s for developmental players so that they get playing time against teams along the Front Range. The schedule should be finalized this next week. We welcome any and all who would like to assist at any time. The players truly appreciate interaction with alumni both at home matches and on trips. Please feel free to contact me or any of the other coaches and we can chat about how best to support your team. A sincere thank you again for all your support! Women's Team (Amy Rusert). The spring schedules are still up in the air, but some great information about some of our fall team members: five members of our women's team earned National Honors being selected to the Fall 2018 D1 All Championship Series First team (position as noted): Callen Medeiros (Prop), Veronica Dodds (Prop), Adrienne Yoder (Flanker), Sierra DeHart (8), Sara Cook (center). [Editor: Five out of 15 is a tremendous statement for the quality of coaching our ladies are getting!]

Cadet Recognitions. Nick Waterman received the 2018 Penn Mutual Life of Significance Award. You can read more about his selection here: https://rugby.pennmutual.com/air-force-rugby-player-building-a-lasting-legacy/ Nick was also recognized as one of the Top 10 #8s in the US and, as a 2020 grad, will be back with us next year.

Join the Ruck (JTR) Status. As we hope you all know, the road to intercollegiate (IC) status is clear: the Athletic Department (AD) is ill-equipped to financially support another sports program. The only path forward is for us to support ourselves. To that end, this past summer we kicked off a $10.5M 5-year JTR campaign to build an endowment invested well enough to spin-off income to support the teams and, therefore, getting the AD to confer IC status. We have allies in the AD and a fund raising team assembled to push ourselves to get to the finish line...as soon as possible! The JTR committee did some work over this past summer, to include tapping some of our grads for financial commitments. The results were encouraging and we are now upping the effort. You do not need to wait to be contacted! If you want to contribute, please go to one (or both!) of the following sites and make your tax deductible donation. It is important to note that gifts to either the men's or women's team all count toward our $10.5M target. Vern Francis Perpetual Fund for Men's Rugby https://www2.usafa.org/Give/perpetualrugby Alan Osur Perpetual Fund for Women's Rugby https://ww2.usafa.org/Give/wrugby

Here is their current status: Date 2018 05 2018 11 Vern Francis Invested $ 182,725 $ 610,435 Vern Francis Pledged $ 31,184 $ 289,922 Vern Francis Planned $ 95,141

Alan Osur Invested $ 43,561 $ 100,773 Alan Osur Pledged $ 7,205 $ 38,388 Alan Osur Planned $ 259,141

Total Invested $ 226,286 $ 711,208 Total Pledged $ 38,389 $ 328,310 Total Planned $ - $ 354,282

So we have $711, 208 towards our 10.5 M goal (9.9%). We had a good amount to start with ($226,000) but the JTR committee got another $500,000 before we even kicked off the campaign. We urge you to Join The Ruck and contribute! We will keep you appraised of status as we go along, but rest assured, every penny donated will go to this campaign.

Board Activities. A question came up recently about a 'tax' on donations given to the Endowment. As we know it, the Superintendent made an executive decision for the Endowment to charge a fee on new money coming into operational accounts. It is our understanding this was done to cover the expenses of the Endowment staff as they go about fund raising activities. We debated whether to reconsider them in our fund raising, but decided to stick for several reasons: - This only affects new money going into the operational funds. - There is no fee assessed against funds donated to our perpetual funds, nor against any crowd funding effort we undertake. - The Endowment fund raising staff (which is about 15 persons as we understand) have fundraising as their only job. We have primarily tapped into their expertise for training on how to conduct our campaign and data on whom to start with when we reach out (effectively prioritizing our time and effort for efficiency in return). These services are not directly paid for and yet give us a good leg up. - The Endowment has contacts with many high net worth individuals and can mention rugby when the time is right. These relationship can produce unforeseen benefits (for example, the Army rugby stadium was paid for by a non-rugby grad who was being solicited by their Endowment equivalent). So the board looked upon this 'haircut' as an investment for the professional talents we do not have in raising the money we need for Intercollegiate status.

Staying Connected. Over the years, many of us have struggled to stay informed about our AFA rugby teams. In case you were not aware, a wide variety of sites contain different types of material. To try and help you focus your searches, here are the ones we know about! - If you’re looking for information about our men’s team, a variety of options exist: · Website: http://www.zoomierugby.com/ · Instagram: @zoomierugby · Twitter: @zoomieRugby · YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFuXSkEJxi19pTHxKcP5REQ Additionally, the men’s team booster club has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ZoomieRugby/. This Facebook page and the men’s team website are maintained by a former team OIC. Our women’s team has two sites available: · Website: http://afclubrugby.wix.com/wzrfc · Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/115971358484614/ If you clicked on the women’s team website hyperlink, you would see that it is not currently maintained and, therefore, not reliable. As for alumni, we have a couple choices available to us: · Website: http://usafarugbyalumni.com/index.php?title=Portal:Main · Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1278288132270630/ We’re in the early stages of using this Facebook group; the website’s main purpose is to preserve the history of our rugby programs. Please visit these pages, share stories and pictures, and extend the invitation to others to do so who may be interested in AFA rugby. As you can see, there are a lot of sites trying to share information about our AFA rugby teams. In fact, over the years, at least three different men’s team sites were created by parents but once their kids graduated, those sites faded away. Maintaining all of these information sources to keep them relevant is a challenge. If you have ideas on how we can better communicate about our teams and our alumni support to them, we’re listening! Please remember that our budget is tiny and our help is just that of volunteers without IT skills

Again, if you see errors or have more information you wish to share, please email us and we will upload it.

Booster Club. Yes, we have a booster club...well, a Men's Booster Club and here is some background. A few years ago, there was an initiative by the men's team leadership to form a 'Booster Club' as a way to collect and distribute funds to the team without the team having to go through the arduous and time consuming process for getting funds from the Endowment (process explained later). The idea generator for this was an active duty member, who would be restricted in a process that included asking for funds. We had two local (civilian grads) who took up the initiative, and began the process of getting it set up as a official tax exempt organization. Our board asked them in to discuss this initiative and came to the conclusion is was complimenting our fund raising, not competing, and made an arrangement where one of their board members would sit on our board, and vice versa to facilitate coordination and information flow. (The Booster Club is mainly focused on the parents for gifting, and the board is mainly focused on alumni). This was a men's team initiative and we realize there needed to be a parallel organization for the women, but the Booster Club wanted to get some experience in the processes and efforts needed for one before launching another. They have been in existence for a little over a year and the board will be looking at how we can/should stand up a similar organization for the women. Here is the website: https://www.zoomierugby.com/.

Letters to the Editors. We'd like to know what you wish to see in these newsletters, so please let us "editors" know: Harry Laws, '69: harryflaws@gmail.com Sarah Emory, '98: sarahlemory@yahoo.com

Portal:2019 Alumni Newsletter

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